Collected Short Fiction, page 72
“And remember that one sunset?” Fred hazarded. “The one with the dust storm?”
Ruby smiled at the fond memory. “It was wonderful. All blue and violet and crimson and streaked with—”
The door popped open and a head stuck in. “Everyone secure? Fine.” The door closed.
“Crewman,” Fred said bitterly. “Always a crewman has to stick his head in where it isn’t wanted. If I were running this ship, I’d—”
“Don’t be that way, sweetheart.”
Fred frowned. “I still don’t think every crewman ought to have a copy of that master key. If it were the captain who—”
Your attention please! The gyros will start in three seconds. Please stay in your bunks during the entire time. There will be a five-second interval of weightlessness, after which the gravity will be shifted for deceleration. There was a brief pause, then: Gyros on. Please remain in your bunks.
Edouard Descartes Andre blew a cloud of blue cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. “Will I be glad to get home!” he said vehemently, “Mars! Canned air and stinks! Dopey-looking fat beetles that claim to have brains!”
In the next bunk, Jerry Hammermill relaxed, his hands folded behind his head and cradling it. “Don’t yap, Eddie, old mug. You made a shivering good bankroll on that shivering planet. And don’t disparage our Martian friends; they may look pretty shivering ugly, but they’ve lined your pocket for you.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk so loud, you idiot!” Andre grumbled unhappily. “I still think they could have those cabins wired.”
“Don’t be a shivering fool,” Hammermill said mildly. “In the first place, my instruments don’t lie, and in the second, the taped stuff I’m feeding into these steel walls would foul up any shivering pickups yet invented. And besides, I haven’t given them any details.”
“Yeah,” said Edouard Descartes Andre. “Sure, you’re the smart one—the smart one who’s going to land us in the brig yet.”
“The smart one,” Hammermill pointed out, “who made us a quarter of a million chips apiece. Besides, if we don’t make any direct evidence against ourselves, the World Government can’t touch us. Martians can’t testify in court.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Andre. He leaned back and glared meaningfully at his companion.
They fell silent. And, slowly, as the spin eased off, orientation was lost. “Up” and “down” gently began to merge with each other, until they vanished and became one with every other direction.
Acceleration in jive seconds, said the speakers.
Captain Bernard L. Deering, a tall, massive man whose iron-gray hair was cropped in a stiff brusheut, and into whose hands the hundred seventy-nine other voyagers aboard the Martian Queen had entrusted their lives during the journey across space, sat in the astrogation dome watching the stars circle around him. Captain Deering had been in the service of Barr Spaceways for some twenty years, after a distinguished career in military service. He knew his ship, and he knew his job.
As the ship’s spin decreased and the gravity dropped, the stars circling the dome slowed to a halt. When they finally stopped altogether, Captain Deering snapped: “Bearing!”
The astrogator, a prune-faced, angular man named Bliven, who had gone into space straight from M.I.T. and who had been part of Deering’s team for eleven years, instantly called out a string of numbers, and the captain smiled. “Dead on,” he said. “Feed in the tape and start her at schedule.”
The automatic landing tape snaked into the computer which fed exactly-timed impulses to the engine room. There was a nearly subsonic hum—the sort heard by the skin rather than the ear. Gradually, gravity returned, this time at right angles to its previous pull. Inside the cabins, the bunks rotated in their frames. While the spin was on, they had been twin beds bolted to the yellow floor, next to a blue wall. Now they became tiered bunks, one above the other, bolted to a yellow wail above a blue floor. The crewmen referred to spin as “yellow gee” and longitudinal thrust as “blue gee,” because of the code coloring of the walls.
The accelerometer climbed swiftly to 980 and held steadily at that. “One of these days,” said the astrogator, “some bright guy is going to have sense enough to define a Standard Gravity as one thousand centimeters per second squared. That’ll relieve us of having to bother with these figures.”
“You want to re-define the centimeters?” Deering asked, grinning.
“Nope. I want to say that the pull at the surface of Earth is point nine eight Standard Gees.”
“I’ll go for that,” agreed the captain.
And that was when it happened. There was a loud thump! that shook the Martian Queen from engine compartment to astrogation dome.
The ship pitched wildly as though she’d been hit by an artillery shell—a big one. The accelerometer needle lurched like a crazy thing and began to climb as though it were going to twist itself around the pin. It reached nine thousand before it suddenly stopped and fell to zero.
The ship was silent. For nearly a minute, no one spoke. The few seconds of exposure to nearly nine gravities had taken the breath out of everyone. Captain Deering coughed and grabbed at the intercom.
“Engines! What happened?”
There was no reply from the engine room.
“Enkers! Olivers! Tance! Punz!” he shouted. “What’s going on back there?”
There was no answer. There couldn’t be. The captain didn’t know it yet, but his engine crew had died in the glare of heat and light, the moment’s flash of radiance, that had wrecked the engine room.
II
White Sands Spaceport covered four hundred square miles of New Mexico desert. It was a great, hard, white, smooth blank spot of land, surrounded by clumps of yuccas and cactus and not much else. At the eastern end, a full square mile of the area was devoted entirely to the Administration area—a neatly-arranged group of shining frosty-white buildings whose irradiated polyethylene walls gleamed brilliantly in the sunlight. The sparkling showier of diamond-bright beams that cascaded from the walls directly in the path of the sun’s rays was hard on the eyes, but it made the spaceport remarkably easy to spot from a few hundred miles up, surrounded as it was by the yellow-brown of the desert.
Neil Stanley looked out of the window of his office and winced at the sun’s heat. He had been working since dawn, and hadn’t realized that the sun had shattered the soothing coolness of the desert morning. He touched the polaroid control gently and the window dimmed, reducing the light to a bearable level.
He didn’t object to the desert as such, but he did object to the heat and the sun. Fortunately, a major general of the Space Service rated an office complete with air-conditioning and window controls, and as Base Coordinator for the commercial flights out of White Sands, his duties didn’t call for much work that couldn’t be handled in his office.
Stanley liked his job simply because it was about as un-military as a job could get. Physically big, quick-witted and impressive-looking, Stanley had mastered military routine fully. He had served at the military spaceport in Nevada, but when the chance had come to take on the difficult task of handling the commercial traffic, he had jumped at it.
The military spaceport in Nevada was remarkably smooth in its operation. Routing was simple; a few well-placed orders did the trick, and they were followed—to the letter.
Civilians didn’t listen to orders half as well, even in situations involving the dangerous business of landing spaceships. Their remarkable obstinacy at times increased the headaches, but it was the constant surprises that made the job fun.
Stanley turned from the window and looked up at the schedule on the wall. The top line read MARTIAN QUEEN—1404 : 9 +/-2. That was the next ship due in. Underneath it was the arrival time of the Aphrodite, due in the next morning.
He checked his watch automatically and computed the time. The radar tower ought to have a fix on the Queen any minute now.
When the phone rang, he grinned. In the matter of predicting what a spaceship is going to do, there’s not much trick in being an honorable prophet. The laws of gravity are as inexorable as the march of time; in order to land a ship in the right place at the right time, there are certain things that have to be done, and certain times to do them.
Stanley picked up the phone. “Stanley here.”
“General, we’ve got the fix on the Martian Queen.”
“What’s the ETA?” Stanley asked.
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “We haven’t computed the ETA, sir,” the voice said hesitantly. “There’s something wrong. The position is off, and the velocity is constant. The—”
“Never mind,” Stanley said, cutting the man off in mid-sentence.
“I’ll be right over.” He slammed the receiver down and pushed the phone away.
He left his office on a dead run, his lips clamped together in a grim scowl. When a radar fix can’t compute the Estimated Time of Arrival of a spaceship instantly, there is something wrong—deadly wrong.
He spun down the flight of stairs from his second-story turret, whirled through the swinging glass doors, and vaulted the two steps that led down to the ground. The pavement was warm beneath his feet, and the hot, dry air swept parchingly into his lungs.
His jeep was waiting for him a little way off, and the driver was half dozing in the nearby shade. But when he saw the major general coming toward him at better than double time, he vaulted into the driver’s seat and had the engine running by the time Stanley got there.
“Radar Tower One,” Stanley snapped. “And gun it!”
The jeep shot off almost instantly. Stanley leaned back, staring at the black tufts of hair on the backs of his fingers, wondering stonily what story was going to be written today, what record of disaster and/or heroism. He didn’t know. He didn’t know what was going to happen. All he knew was the Martian Queen had gone haywire and wasn’t doing what it should be doing, up there in the sky.
The radar tower was a spidery structure whose struts and girders stood outlined sharply against the sky, metallic gray against bright, painful blue. The jeep pulled up short in front of the tower, and Stanley climbed out almost in the same instant. “Stay here,” he called to his driver, as he went inside.
Three bleak-faced men waited for him there.
“Sir, do you think—?” began Sokolow, a thin, sandy-haired technician whose face creased in a perpetual scowl.
“Never mind,” Stanley said crisply. “Time to talk later.” He pushed back his cap and walked past them without bothering to ask questions.
“Chart,” he murmured.
They complied. Stanley looked at the blip on the scope and checked the reading against the chart, frowning worriedly. Something was definitely wrong; the blip wasn’t moving, which indicated a constant velocity. The Queen should have started decelerating long before this.
A bead of sweat trickled down his heavily-tanned forehead, and he brushed it away impatiently. The data was there. The Queen wasn’t decelerating. Why? Who knew? Who cared? All that mattered was the bare fact.
“Get me a direct line to Captain Deering!” Stanley said sharply, without looking up from the charts.
“Yes, sir,” Sokolow said.
Stanley rubbed his chin. The ETA charts were simplicity itself. The readings on the screen could be checked against the charts and the time for landing was right there; the figures had been computed long before. All the radar man needed to know was the ship’s position, velocity, and negative acceleration.
But this ship was off position and had no negative acceleration, and the charts weren’t set up for a situation like that. Preconceived rules are nice things to have, but they simply don’t work in an emergency.
While the radio man upstairs tried feverishly to get a direct communication to the Martian Queen, Stanley reached across the desk, pounced on the phone, grabbed it toward him, and dialed Routing.
“Stanley here. I want a computation fast.” He glanced at the screen and rattled off the bearing, velocity, and direction of the blip on the radar. “I want to know when and where she’ll hit if she doesn’t decelerate. Got that?”
When and where she’ll hit. He said the words in a clipped, businesslike manner, concealing the feeling that lay behind them. It was impossible for him to get hysterical over the situation, but he certainly appreciated its ugliness. Spaceships are big, heavy things, traveling at fantastic speeds, and a man who had worked with them half his life knew exactly what potential danger each one carried.
“Got it, general. We’ll feed it into the DIRAC right away.”
“Make it fast. I want that information yesterday, if not sooner.”
He slammed down the phone.
There were footsteps behind him.
“I’ve got Captain Deering, sir,” said the radio man.
Attention! There has been a slight change in the landing procedure. Please remain in your bunks until you are given the all-clear. There is nothing to be alarmed about; there will, simply be a slight change in landing time. Repeat: there is nothing to be alarmed about.
Captain Deering frowned as he listened to the voice of Lieutenant Bessemer over the speaker. That final repeat, he thought, was unnecessary, even if it was good procedure. Civilians were sure to get suspicious if they were told too earnestly that all is well.
He hoped the words would be effective. A slight change in landing time. It sounded fine, but, chillingly enough, it was perfectly true. If the Queen couldn’t be straightened out, there would not only be a change in landing time, but a different velocity as well. The velocity of the Martian-Queen was a long way from being zero with respect to the Earth.
The intercom buzzed loudly. “Captain? Hagerty here. We can’t get into the engine room, sir. The place is hotter than a Roman candle.”
Radioactivity or thermal?”
“Both. The scintillation counters are fizzing all over the place, and the temperature’s running close to three hundred Fahrenheit. Couldn’t be anyone left alive in there.”
Captain Deering thought fleetingly of his four-man engine crew, and said, “Get out one of the suits and send a man in there for a look around. Don’t overexpose him, but try to get an estimate of the damage. We’ve got to get this bird back under control, and we’ve only got minutes to do it!”
Marian MacBride turned her head to smile at her husband. “This gravitylessness isn’t so bad, is it? Once you get used to it, I mean.” George grinned. “ ‘Gravitylessness,’ ” he mimicked. “Now, there’s a word I like. Couldn’t we add a few more syllables, just for effect?”
“Don’t tease, George. What I mean is, I think it’s fun.”
“Fun, she says!” MacBride laughed. “If that’s your idea of fun, you can have it, honey. Me, I like to know which way is down. Close your eyes and try to imagine you’re hanging on the ceiling. Or floating around in the air, or—”
“Stop it, George,” she said petulantly. “What are you trying to do? Make me sick?”
“Yup. I figure that if you’re sick, I’ll be so worried about it that I won’t have a chance to be able to think about being sick myself.”
“Fine sentiment!” Then she paused. “What do you suppose is the matter? That was an awful shake we had.”
“Meteor, probably,” George said. “A big rock can do a lot of damage to a ship if it hits it, you know.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as the ship doesn’t lose its air, we’re all right. I’ve read about meteor collisions. All the air goes out, and everybody smothers, or something. I wouldn’t like to die that way.”
“It does seem a rather stuffy death,” agreed George. “But these new ships can spot anything big a long way off. There’s nothing to worry about. The death rate for spaceships is a lot lower per capita than even aircraft.” He stopped suddenly, realizing that the conversation was frightening both of them a little, and aware that what he was telling her so solemnly was probably scientific hogwash anyway. Their voices were getting tense.
He put his hands behind his head. His fingers were cold.
“It does seem a rather stuffy death,” he said, trying to make his voice sound cheerful the second time. “You recognize the allusion, don’t you, Marian?”
She thought for a moment. “That was that music thing you were in last year, wasn’t it? The Gilbert & Sullivan operetta?”
“Yes,” he said. “Remember, Yum-Yum says it to—”
He glanced at her. She wasn’t at all interested.
“Anyway,” he said, “if we stopped to avoid the meteor, it’s not going to hit us, is it?”
“Do you think—”
“No, sweetheart. I can guarantee we won’t hit it.”
Ruby Armbruster was being violently sick. Her face was buried in the mouth of the collapsible plastic emergency bag, and her body seemed to be trying to tear itself apart with the racking convulsions that surged through it.
Fred had unstrapped himself from his own bunk and lowered himself to where his wife lay. Her dry, harsh coughs showed that her stomach was, by now, completely empty; only the automatic nervous reaction kept up the terrible nausea.
“You’ll be all right, dear,” he said soothingly. “You’ll be all right. The gravity will come on pretty soon. You’ll be all right.”
Over and over he repeated it, trying to lull her into relaxation, trying to stop the awful, twisting convulsions of her abdomen.
Finally, the nausea subsided a bit. She turned, looked up, her face was beaded with sweat, and she was trembling all over. She sighed gently, struggling to regain control over herself.
“Oooohhh . . . Ohh, Fred—”
“Easy, honey.”
“I feel as though I’d lost everything. I . . . I . . . ooohh . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Feel bad, honey?”
“Horrible. There’s no up—Hold me, Fred. Hold me. I think . . . I mean, it feels like I’m falling.” Her voice told of terrible, primitive fear welling up from somewhere in the recesses of her subconscious. “Don’t let me fall, Fred. Please—don’t let me fall!”
